The first version of the road style is prepared. It is work in progress and feedback is welcomed. I started work from designing z16 zoom level, currently I am expanding style to cover higher and lower zoom levels.

Current rendering (preview location from openstreetmap-carto readme)

Style under development - with its variants

Major roads

Display of major roads on lower zoom levels is currently working quite OK and I am trying to make it better. For example, I am considering various variants how junction names and oneway arrows should be rendered. Below are some of possibilities.

highway=footway, highway=pedestrian

Current rendering of highway=footway is quite noisy, also highway=pedestrian is closer to highway=tertiary in its style than to highway=footway. Dotted highway footway is not pretty - for example rendering proposed by sb12 is much prettier. But finding styling that would at the same time would be prettier than current one, do not look like a road and fulfil additional criteria turned out to be an interesting challenge. Finally, after many failed attempts, I tried as joke styling inspired by OSM landscape. It turned out to be better than expected and was the first one that was considered by testers both as prettier and with readability not worse than the current rendering.

Unfortunately, purple is already used for borders, airport infrastructure, railway landuse and industrial landuse so I am experimenting with both different colour for pedestrian infrastructure and changing landuse colours.

railway=tram

During more close checking of rendering I discovered that tram tracks were rendered also on z10, z11 and z12 what was quite surprising as I never noticed it.

On reading code I discovered that railway=tram was rendered from z8, what makes no sense. Especially with current style as even during looking for tram lines at known positions I failed to notice it.

Overall this was one of many things leading to really bad rendering of cities around z10.

Even in Toronto, city with "the largest streetcar system in the Americas"[1] and quite far on the north (relevant due to distortion of scale) it makes sense to render trams up to z12. It is possible to make a weak argument for rendering at z11. See http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/ai3 (I linked overpass turbo, as in current rendering tram lines are not possible to find - despite rendering them).

Other example, Vienna - "With 173.4 km of track, Vienna's network is one of the largest in the world."[2] z11 is the lowest zlevel where rendering tram makes sense ( http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/ai4 - note, query returns large amount of data).

In general it seems that even with large networks rendering tram up to z12 makes sense, z11 may be justified but it is not the best idea but later it is rather pointless.

And obviously, there is no point in rendering something in way that makes it impossible to notice it.

Unfortunately it is impossible to make rendering great for all locations. In some places each tram tracks is mapped separately and in some places two tracks are together mapped as a single railway=tram line. In places where two tracks are mapped as one on low zoom levels trams are not displayed not as strong where each track is mapped. Compare for example Praha (where two tracks are mapped as a single railway=tram line) with Helsinki and Kraków (each track mapped as railway=tram line).

Tram rendering is causing exactly the same problem with current road style and my proposed version. Working on it separately makes easier to test and review so I prepared it as a separate change.

The main highway coloring looks good, the subtle variants are somewhat difficult to judge - i tend to prefer the stronger fill for highway=motorway but the weaker yellow for secondary. I have come to terms with the red junction labels but i still prefer the blue oneway arrrows for some reason.

You seem to have narrowed the roads at z=15/16 but not at 13/14 - this looks good on Malmö but as you know less so at lower latitudes.

Trams look good as well now IMO.

As for the footways - i am sorry but i distinctly do not like the changes in most cases - the sb12 variant looks mostly fine on the higher zooms in urban context although it looks strange in combinations with tracks. The current rendering - as noisy as it might be - is very distinct and well recognizable for features that are very important to many map users. This is not the case for the new stylings. I particularly think the rendering of highway=path is very difficult to improve, it works on a wide range of scales, for a long distance path that is straight across many kilometers as well as for one with small scale curves and bends. The new styling OTOH is just a line that could be anything - fence, power line, boundary - you name it.

Confession, being UK based I prefer the current colour scheme. Having said that, if you are going to change it then none of your examples above currently distinguish motorways from trunk roads sufficiently (see US41 on the right of each of your images above).

I agree with your decision on rendering trams only at zoom 12+ as a railway fan (and co-developer of OpenRailwayMap). I have had a look on tram lines which go kilometres out of their city, e.g. Gotha–Tabarz.

If you go to change rendering of trams, you should also have a look at rendering of light rails (railway=light_rail). Light rails often run near roads (or between the two carriageways). Especially in Germany, we have multiple cities where light rails serve the job of trams, e.g. Stuttgart or Frankfurt (Frankfurt has two separate systems a partially over- partially underground light rail and a tram network). (trams are pink, light rails green, undergrounds blue, orange/black/brown/yellow/red are heavy railway tracks, tunnels are brighter)

It seems that there's no distinction between highway=trunk and highway=motorway? There's a huge difference between those two road types in Germany and the new rendering which treats them equal would be missleading.

You seem to have narrowed the roads at z=15/16 but not at 13/14 - this looks good on Malmö but as you know less so at lower latitudes.

Yes, narrowing of roads was mostly done during preparing rendering for z16 and I plan to experiment with widths a bit more. Can you give example of well mapped city/town at low latitude for testing? Most of what I found had really high road density and also benefited from less wide roads.

Currently both are rendered in exactly the same style. I thought that it would be a good idea to reduce number of road classes with a separate style (like Humanitarian style did) but it seems that this idea is not liked.

If you go to change rendering of trams, you should also have a look at rendering of light rails (railway=light_rail)

Is it basically a tram equivalent? From description on OSM wiki it seems indistinguishable from railway=tram and it seems to be result of the different local name for trams. For example wikipedia article has "a mode of transit service (also called streetcar, tramway, or trolley)" quote.

Currently railway=light_rail, railway=funicular, railway_narrow_gauge are rendered in the same style. Maybe it would make sense to render railway=light_rail rather like railway=tram.

I have come to terms with the red junction labels but i still prefer the blue oneway arrrows for some reason. (...) Trams look good as well now IMO. (...) As for the footways

Switching from blue motorways was one of main reasons why I thought about redesigning roads :)

It is probably a bit of cultural effect - I never encountered map with blue used for roads before OSM. From start I keep confusing motorways with rivers. My the first reaction to http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=12/50.0554/19.9395 was "why river is so badly mapped?".

It is not just me, it is reaction of also some other people on showing them OSM for the first time.

I hope that red - orange - white color scheme will be more universal that UK Ordnance styling.

lose a color which currently doesn't conflict.

It conflicts with water - some time ago I attempted to experiment with water rendering and blue motorway blocked attempts to change.

Answering only on the footway rendering (partly because I think the other proposals are either good or better than the current rendering, or too much of a question of taste).

I guess I really don't like any of the highway=footway proposals: neither are visible enough and different enough from other rendered elements:

purple rendering is too close to the border current style, the continuous line being just one version of the dash-styles. Besides, on the example given here on forest, it looks grey even when knowing it is purple. Very thin grey line is used for some kind of barrier, if I remember well?

pink seems rather a «non-physical element» color. It is also too close to the private highway color. Orange is kind of the same.

with borders, it looks like a strange service road that didn't get the white center painted.

Proposals/suggestions now. I don't want to reopen the path/footway debate once more, but what about the path rendering? Will it be modified or remain the same? I think that the path style cannot really be left out of this proposal.

To me, it seems that it would also be a much better start point for the footways rendering (black thin and long dashes): visible enough (why decrease so much the footway visibility when keeping the cycleways at the same visibility level?), coherent/readable enough (used on several rendering styles).

Path (without a bicycle=yes/designated tag) and footway (without a bicycle=yes/designated tag) could, in my opinion, be rendered asame, with the style switched back to the cycleway when bicycle are explicitly allowed (as is currently the case for footways, I think).

And finally, thanks for the job and being able to take in all the criticism, that, I hope, remains helpful!

When Landranger 1:50k maps were introduced in 1974 one of the major changes in appearance was that motorways became blue. I am sure there were three factors behind this: the maps had become much less useful for both motorists & pedestrians as the motorway system developed; blue was also the colour of motorway signs and thirdly, for cost reasons, they needed to use one of the existing colours (IIRC 7th series used a 7 colour print process). I am sure they considered any implications of confusion with rivers at the time.

I can't remember much fuss about this change: there was a considerable brouhaha about administrative borders and path symbols being too similar (which led to a change quite quickly).

Trunk roads became green much later (and trunk & primary are still shown with similar styles on the more walker-oriented 1:25k maps), but I would think the motivation was similar: to make the maps more useful/appealing to motorists.

I'm not absolutely sure, but I think blue for motorways may have first appeared on AA maps. Here's one example from the mid-1970s:

I hope that red - orange - white color scheme will be more universal that UK Ordnance styling.

Please - don't get confused into thinking that the current OSM colour scheme is Ordnance Survey-derived. It isn't. It's the British cartographic standard, no matter what mapmaker. In actual fact, Ordnance Survey were the laggards in switching to green trunk roads on many of their maps.

Blue is a common colour worldwide for motorway signage, hence the use in maps.

Can you give example of well mapped city/town at low latitude for testing? Most of what I found had really high road density and also benefited from less wide roads.

Road density in Mercator is both a function of latitude and of cultural/historical aspects. Many cities in equatorial areas are densely built while in northern Europe and North America they are often coarser. This emphasizes the latitude effect.

And i am for the non-blue motorways - if a distinction between motorway and trunk is considered necessary this should be a relatively subtle variation in red, possibly simply a distinct centerline color as in the german style. Getting blue (and green of course) out of the roads will go a long way towards more consistent use of color in the style. As SK53 pointed out historically color selection was often made with regards to the limited set of colors that could be printed without halftoning. On the other hand printed maps can do a lot more with thin lines, line signatures and patterns - historically the German topographic maps for example did not use any color in road rendering at 25k:

and at coarser scales all major roads were red. Same applies to the Swiss maps - only last years they started using colored roads at 25k (with orange for motorway/trunk and pale red for major roads).

Ordnance survey is using different strong color for each road type. Note that usage of saturated colors is restricted for that purpose.

OSM map is currently trying to use broad range of colors for multiple purposes, not only for roads. The most obvious are different landuses displayed as areas with various colors - not only as labels. There are also many additional features (for example pitches, parkings, labels for motorway junctions...).

Currently leads to problems like "ops, trunk road through forest is invisible" and result is sometimes closer to abstract art than to an useful map.

One solution is to no longer display so many features differently - for example stop rendering most landuses as areas.

Other solution is to not use not so broad range of colours for different features - for example starting for roads.

In addition OSM map generation is fully automated what makes good label placement and things like box listing ferries extremely complicated (in theory doable, in practise...). Note also that many map styles strongly benefit from fact that one style is not supposed to work across the entire world.

The OS map example is excellent, because it also shows you things which are more or less impossible to read even on the 1:25k cartography of the OSGB. Notably that there are footways between some of the roads in the top right-hand corner. This is a personal bugbear of mine with the Explorer maps: it is more or less impossible to use them to navigate in urban areas which are rich in paths. For instance, about 5 years ago, I was in Corby and needed to walk from the centre to a hotel on the outskirts. Much of Corby was blank on OSM so I used my Explorer map: the safe route I took was around 1.5 km longer than the shortest route, because I did not want to risk finding myself in a dead end. Currently OSM standard rendering is much more satisfactory for this purpose than OSGB: even if OSM was not designed at the outset for such a purpose.

In practical terms this is because OSGB shows hedges & fences in urban areas which tend to create too much clutter for things like paths to be readable. It does make for an attractive product, but they certainly have scope for improving this: for instance subtle difference in style for urban/rural areas (which is something we should consider for OSM).

Disclaimer, I'm British so I might be biased towards the current OSM Standard styling.

I'm not entirely sure if changing the major road styling is an optimum strategy. Given the current styling has been in use for 5+ (?) years, many people may be used to how the standard map looks. When was the last major change to the style?

By all means create alternative styles, but to enforce such a high level visible change could easily create a lot of confusion / annoyance for many users.

FWIW it is not an universal standard for signs either - there is probably some kind of EU regulation for blue signs but traditionally many countries use green - like Italy, Turkey, USA, China.

Blue is still familiar in the U.S., despite the use of green signage, because most motorways are Interstates, and Interstate shields have a blue background. However, print maps in the U.S. may use any number of colors: blue, red, yellow, and green are all common.

Thank you so much on the footways, I've been waiting for this for so long. All of the choices presented are so much better than the red dots that it's hard to choose a best, but if pressed I'd rank them as sb12 > orange > pink > purple. I'd also like to see examples of areas with sidewalks mapped as separate ways slightly more zoomed in (the near landuse=railway example has some, but they're partly covered by the road rendering).

With regards to the road changes, they're different, but I feel like I could get used to them quickly enough.

As someone who grew up with Michelin and Falck maps, I still have "problems" with the current colour scheme of OSM. I find the German style (yellow with red for highways) much more familiar.
One's personal favorite will be highly influenced by this. So depending on whether a lot of Brits, German or French people react, the pro's and contra's for the blue (current) might be different.

That's the problem with those types of polls, the results are biased towards the (English) speaking community (I fear).

For UK use, it's vital that the style distinguishes between highway=trunk and highway=motorway, as the two roads have different rules and restrictions. If the number of different types of roads that can be distinguished is limited, then it would make more sense to group highway=trunk and highway=primary together -- although that wouldn't really be ideal either.

I understand why it would be advantageous to avoid using green and blue for road colours, but in the UK, those are the commonly used colours for motorway and trunk roads on many different popular maps -- as are derived from the colour of the road signs on those roads. For UK users, maps using different colours are going to look strange, and that may harm adoption. Perhaps we need to look at using different colour schemes for different countries...

Hi guys,
in Italy this white yellow orange red scheme doesn’t give any particular problem to me...they are not the colors of the road signs here but I think the important things are to easily recognize the roads from the other elements on the map and discriminate the main roads from the minor ones.
This scheme work great with GoogleMaps and I've not read or heard of any problem for the UK/Anglophone people using it, so why are there so many problem in OSM?

In carto similar elements have similar colors, the only exception is the actual road color scheme with color that span in an UK centric way (this is not necessary a con) with blue, green, red, orange, yellow, white and grey lines and the first two colors (used for the main roads)are used already to draw other and totally different elements.

So this color-scheme is familiar mainly only with anglophone people and gives serious discrimination problems in the well mapped areas, while the new color-scheme is (sadly)more familiar to anyone using an online map and it has not discrimination problem in well mapped areas.

OSM is an international project, and in some non-anglophone place in the world the actual color scheme has little or no sense. the only way we have to identify the main road is because of their thickness not by their color. with this new color scheme also the color help to discriminate the main roads from the minor one and the same discrimination logic can be used by anyone, including english people.

Is switching from blue motorways necessary? I realize that blue doesn't cleanly fit into a yellow orange red scheme, but it's unfortunate to lose a color which currently doesn't conflict.

There is already a conflict! Motorway blue looks similar to water blue.

I had a client who got rendered OSM maps (the Carto-like style of Maperitive) for printing. He asked me first to change the motorway blue to orange because it looked better.

From car driver point of view, there is less difference between a trunk and a motorway. By default, trunk have no speed limit in Germany (like motorways). The only differences are shorter curve radius and smaller lanes. That's why rendering of motorways and trunks should be similar.

@escada: Sure, you will get different results depending on whom you ask. But it's not automatically true that Germans will prefer orange-red motorways. I'm German, but I've never had much exposure to Michelin maps. (I'm probably too young.) So to me, blue seems like a perfect colour for motorways.